JD Mechelke

“We must acknowledge the utter fragility of what holds our lives together—our institutions, our shared labor, our love, our mourning—and yet keep faith with what offers no final guarantee. This is the double movement of secular faith. (377)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“The passion and pathos of living with your beloved are therefore incompatible with the security of an eternal life. The sense of something being unique and irreplaceable is inseparable from the sense that it can be lost. This relation to loss is inscribed in the very form of living on. To live on is never to repose in a timeless or endless presence. Rather, to live on is to remain after a past that has ceased to be and before an unpredictable future that may not come to be. (44)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“Christian charity does not seek to abolish poverty in this life but rather maintains the poor in an asymmetrical position of dependence on those who offer them charity, leaving them waiting for redemption in an eternal life (the new Jerusalem).”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“What ultimately matters from a religious perspective is not freedom but salvation; what ultimately matters is not to lead a life but to be saved from being alive.”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom